Katya persuaded her husband to leave, to forget for a while both Bolsheviks and Germans.
Then they would see....
Vadim Petrovich obeyed her.
Once he had settled down in Samara, he never left the doctor's flat.
He ate and slept.
But how was he to forget?
Every morning, opening the Samara Soviet News, which was printed on wrapping paper, he set his jaws.
Every line seared him like a lash....
"... the All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Peasants' Deputies appeals to the peasants, workers and soldiers of Germany and Austro-Hungary to offer ruthless resistance to the imperialist demands of their governments.... We appeal to the soldiers, peasants and workers of France, England and Italy, to force their bloodthirsty governments to conclude an immediate, democratic, just peace with all nations.... Down with the imperialist war!
Long live the fraternal ties between workers of all countries!"
"Forget!
Oh, Katya!
I should have to forget myself first!
Forget the immemorial past!
Our former great-ness!... Less than a century ago, Russia was imposing her will upon Europe.... And are we to meekly lay all this at the feet of Germany now?
Dictatorship of the proletariat!
Oh, what words!
Stupidity!
Oh, Russian stupidity! And the muzhik?
Oh, the muzhik!
He will pay dear for all this...."
"No, Dmitri Stepanovich," Roshchin would reply to the doctor's endless arguments at the tea table, "there are still forces left in Russia.... We're not dead yet.... We're not mere dung for your Germans.... There's fight in us yet!
We'll defend Russia—defend her to the death.... Only give us time!"
Katya, who was the third member of the party around the samovar, deduced only one thing from all these arguments—Roshchin, her beloved, was unhappy. He suffered as if under slow torture.
His round cropped head had become touched with silver.
His haggard face, with the dark sunken eyes, looked almost charred.
When he said, clenching his heavy fists on the tattered oilcloth:
"We will avenge ourselves!
We will punish!", all Katya understood was that he had come back home angry, powerless, wretched, and was threatening somebody:
"Just wait— we'll be even with you!" But upon whom could Roshchin revenge himself—this gently bred, delicate, mortally weary man?
Surely not upon those ragged Russian soldiers, begging for a crust and a cigarette in the cold streets?
Katya would sit down gently beside her husband and stroke his hand.
She was overcome with tenderness and pity for him.
She could never understand evil—if she encountered it in another she was always ready to blame herself.
She understood nothing of what was going on.
For her the revolution was like a stormy night which had descended upon Russia.
There were a few words of which she was afraid: Sov. Dep. (Soviet of Deputies), for instance, seemed to her a ferocious word, Rev. Com. (Revolutionary Committee) a terrifying one, like the roar of a bull, thrusting its shaggy head through a wattle fence into the garden where the little Katya was standing. (There had been an incident like this in her childhood.) When she unfolded the single brown sheet of newspaper and read:
"French imperialism, with its predatory plans and rapacious allies..." she conjured up Paris, with its still, bluish summer mists, its vanilla-flavoured melancholy, the gurgling rills in its gutters; she remembered the stranger who had followed her about and had spoken to her on the park bench the day before he died:
"You mustn't be afraid of me, I have angina pectoris, I'm an old man.
A great misfortune has come upon me—I have fallen in love with you.
Oh, what a sweet face you have!"
"Surely they're not imperialists!" thought Katya.
Winter was drawing to an end.
The town was full of rumours, each more fantastic than the last.
It was said that the English and French were making a secret peace with Germany, in order to fall upon Russia with their combined forces.
Legendary victories were ascribed to Kornilov, who was said to be breaking up, with a handful of officers, the thousand-strong battalions of the Red Guards, capturing Cossack villages, which they immediately relinquished as of no use to them, and preparing for a general summer offensive on Moscow.
"Oh, Katya!" cried Roshchin, "and I sit here in comfort, while fighting is going on. I can't bear it, I can't, I can't!"
On the 4th of February a crowd bearing flags and slogans swept by the windows of the doctor's flat. Thick snow was falling, and a blizzard was beginning, and the brass trumpets blared out the Internationale.
The doctor tumbled noisily into the dining room, his cap and coat sprinkled with snow.
"Peace with the Germans, friends!"